Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Right vs. Left, Ortho vs. Hetero?
Oh Economist's View, what would I do without you? Great fodder for procrastination. Mark Thoma linked this blog post by Gregory Mankiw (see posts below) which delineates the differences between right and left leaning economists. I wonder if the same sort of chart could be made for ortho vs. hetero. I wouldn't call many of the beliefs set out by Mankiw to be inherently political, but instead economic. Does hetero overlap with many of the "left" views, or is it in its own league? At least with regards to ideas about competition, I feel that the left and the hetero would agree on their analysis of power in the markets, although maybe heterodox economists would go further in their claims about power disparities. Anyways, I thought this would just be an interesting thing to think about as we attempt to think about things other than finals. How political are the differences between right and left, and how do these differences mirror the differences between mainstream and heterodox economists? My guess is there is a lot of common ground in a lot of other places between so-called left-leaning and heterodox economists.
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Me and a co-author have recently completed a paper on the analysis of economists’ disagreement and of its determinants.
http://micdimaio.googlepages.com/DeBenedictisDiMaio2008-Economistsvie.pdf
As a case study we took the Italian profession and we measured Italian economists' disagreement about : 1) the cause of the difficulties of the Italian economy; 2) which are the most effective policy proposals to solve the economy's problems.
Then we relate the respondent's opinion on each specific policy proposal to her individual characteristics, academic profile, methodological approach and political opinions.
We find that the political view of the respondent matters a lot in explaining difference in the judgement of a policy proposal but which aspect of her political view matters most depends on how much controversial the policy proposal is.
We have also prepared a website for additional documentation on the survey - the questionnaire, other descriptive statistics, etc.. The link is:
http://micdimaio.googlepages.com/surveyofitalianeconomists
No need to say, whatever comments or suggestion is more than welcome.
Ciao,
michele
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